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The death of Hugo Chavez Frias provoked cries of “Hallelujah!” from pundits on the right. Michael Moynihan, writing in the Daily Beast (the internet incarnation of Newsweek), jeered “Good riddance!” while he danced on the Venezuelan strongman’s grave. All the usual suspects – the War Street Journal, the “conservatives” over at National Review, and the Israel Firsters of Commentary – took the opportunity to revile the deceased. Their collective view of Chavez’s Venezuela was summed up by Rory Carroll’s recent polemic, Commandante, as “a land of power cuts, broken escalators, shortages, queues, insecurity, bureaucracy, unreturned calls, unfilled holes, uncollected garbage.” That this could easily describe any number of American cities – say, Detroit – is apparently lost on Chavez’s detractors.

Chavez was regularly denounced as a “dictator” – a curious charge in view of the fact that he won no less than nine national elections hands down. In spite of the millions of US taxpayer dollars poured into the coffers of the anti-Chavez opposition – and a US-supported military coup in 2002 – Chavismo won the hearts and minds of Venezuelans.

The reasons for this are not hard to discern. Venezuela pre-Chavez was supposed to be a model for the region – until things fell apart. The fourth-largest supplier of oil to the US, the country had been a Latinized version of the US for 40 years: power had regularly switched back and forth between the “left”-leaning Democratic Action party and the slightly more conservative Social Christian party. But the worm in the apple was stirring – and when the bottom fell out of the oil market, in the 1980s, the worm emerged in the form of an economic downturn that sent the nation reeling. The irony is that the conditions Chavez’s detractors attribute to his rule were present at the creation: per capita income dropped precipitously, inflation soared, and, by the time Chavez emerged as a major player, capital was fleeing the country at a rate of $500 million every month. The most free-spending government in the region was blindsided by a foreign debt of $29 billion. The social order began to break down: Caracas, always a bit threadbare, descended into seediness. Strikes broke out and brought what remained of public services to a grinding halt.

The ruling elite – “Spanish” grandees who kept their distance from the Indian majority, both figuratively and literally – ignored the crisis, and the political system descended into gridlock. The two major parties were concerned only with preserving their perks and privileges, and corruption was rampant. Chavez’s moment had come.

Born to a poor family in the agricultural region of Barinas, in the poor village of Sabaneta, Chavez was sent to live with his grandmother because the family could not afford to support him. He lionized his great-great-grandfather, who had served in the army of Ezequiel Zamora, the 19th century liberal general who rose in 1876 in an abortive coup against the central government. He entered a military academy in Caracas at age 17, where he took up the study of Simon Bolivar, his hero, and was influenced by the left-leaning military leaders who were then prominent in South and Central American politics: Omar Torrigos of Panama and Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru. Sent to the rural areas to fight leftist insurgents, Chavez saw that the poverty of these landless folks was what motivated the Maoist guerrillas he was battling, and he soon became sympathetic to their plight if not their methods. He began to meet with leftist leaders, and, one day, coming upon a bullet-ridden car used by the guerrillas, he found a cache of literature, including the works of Marx, Mao, and – most importantly – a biography of General Zamora, his youthful hero, whose life he assiduously studied.

By 1977, he had founded a secret revolutionary cell in the armed forces, based on what he called “Bolivarianism“: although he had read the Marxist classics, Chavez was no red but a fervent nationalist who wanted to throw out the corrupt elites – the grandees who extracted oil profits from the soil of Venezuela and invested it in Miami’s luxury highrises. Rejecting both capitalism and communism, he sought to construct an ideology based on the “three roots of the tree,” a nationalist triumvirate of Bolivar, Zamora, and Simon Rodriguez (Bolivar’s tutor and mentor).

The 1989 election of Carlos Andres Perez – who had promised to defy the so-called “Washington Consensus” of neoliberal “reforms” – ended in riots as the new President backed down on his campaign promises and bowed to Washington’s diktat. Social programs were cut, land reform was stymied, and the country was opened up to foreign looters. The riots were put down with brutal force: hundreds were massacred. What Chavez called “the dictatorship of the IMF” had triumphed – but he had a plan.

On February 4, 1992, the Chavistas rose up: commanding four military units, Chavez tried to seize the presidential palace, issue a call to rebellion on national television, and take power. The coup failed, however, and Chavez gave himself up to the government, but not before making a deal: he would agree to order his supporters throughout the country to lay down their arms on the condition that he be allowed to appear on television for a final statement – to be delivered in his military uniform.

It was a stroke of genius: the broadcast made him a hero to the urban poor: a popular film was made of his life story. There were massive demonstrations outside his jail cell: he was transferred to another facility. In 1994, he was freed by newly-elected President Rafael Caldera, who had pledged to do so during the campaign: however, Chavez was not allowed to return to the military, where he might organize another coup. He set about building his Bolivarian movement even as Venezuela took a turn for the worse. Inflation was rampant, crime was pandemic, and the country was coming apart at the seams: President Caldera was charged with malfeasance in office and misappropriation of funds, and impeached.

Chavez gave up his dreams of a coup and entered electoral politics, founding his Fifth Republic Movement in 1997 and standing for president as its candidate the next year. The central message of his campaign was a direct attack on the system known as puntofijisimo, the political patronage system that doled out resources via the two “major” parties. Those parties, unbeknownst to them, were about to be reduced to minor party status. With the backing of a center-left coalition, as well as the largely irrelevant Communist Party, Chavez won over 56 percent of the vote – in spite of a smear campaign in the oligarch-controlled media, including the charge that he was a cannibal with a particular taste for tender young children.

His first term in office hardly lived up to his revolutionary rhetoric: he pursued moderately “left”-wing social democratic policies, and even paid a visit to the New York Stock Exchange, where he encouraged investors to sink their money into the new Venezuela. His social welfare programs were exemplified by “Plan Bolivar,” in which the army was instructed to go out into the streets, repair roads and dilapidated homes, and sell food at bargain prices. The program was begun on the anniversary of the 1989 massacre: “We gave them lead,” Chavez remarked, “now we will give them love.”

He held a national referendum on a new constitution that would set up a constituent assembly for the express purpose of abolishing government agencies and dismissing corrupt public officials. He gave back the land to the indigenous peoples it had been stolen from. He started a national literacy campaign, which has succeeded in raising the literacy level to levels unparalleled on the continent.

Washington hated him from the beginning, and did everything to undermine him – including supporting a failed 2002 coup, which was stymied in the end by a mass outpouring of popular protest. Chavez returned to power with a new determination to jealously guard his country’s independence. As he later put it:

“The Bolivarian Movement was born in the barracks some 15 years ago when a group of soldiers came to the conclusion that the enemy was not communism, but imperialism. For many years we worked carefully and gradually to develop a nationalist, patriotic movement with one hand in the barracks and another on the street. We developed a Bolivarian conception of revolution, which understands that we face a different empire to that confronted by Bolívar. Bolívar, however, did foresee that North America was destined to plague us in the name of liberty.

“. . . We pose the questions of independence and sovereignty by calling for a new continent-wide independence movement,” he averred. The system that had dominated his country since 1945 “was broken,” and “there are no half-measures on questions of sovereignty. There has to be direct democracy, people’s government with popular assemblies and congresses where the people retain the right to remove, nominate, sanction, and recall their elected delegates and representatives.”

In the name of “free enterprise” – Washington-style – the crony capitalists who had taken Venezuela by the throat were choking the nation to death and then fleeing with the proceeds to Miami. Chavez put a stop to that, to Washington’s lasting irritation, as well as putting a stop to overflights by US “drug-fighting” aircraft. His nationalist ideology, expressed in terms of Venezuela’s foreign policy, was to align with whatever tinpot despotism the US was currently trying to overthrow, from “Brother Qadaffi” to Iran’s mullahs. US involvement in the 1992 coup attempt was doubtless behind much of this, but there was an ideological basis for it as well.

It was convenient for the Western media to characterize Chavez as a radical socialist, a “red,” and his friendship with Fidel Castro, whom he called “my father,” is all the evidence long-out-of-work cold warriors require to condemn him as a Marxist “revolutionary.” Yet he was a profoundly conservative man, whose policies proceeded from a regionalist nationalism: Bolivarian populism, as originally conceived, is closer, ideologically, to the American revolutionaries of 1776 than to the Bolshevik revolutionaries of 1917. He laced his rhetoric with leftist rhetoric, and even changed the name of his movement to include the word socialist, and yet this was mainly window-dressing for what was, essentially, a radical nationalism with conventional social democratic overtones. He was, in essence, a patriot, and not a revolutionary at all.

Which is, of course, precisely why the globalists in Washington had every good reason to celebrate his death.

"The death of Hugo Chavez Frias provoked cries of “Hallelujah!” from pundits on the right."

I'll never understand how some people can become beside themselves with rage over what happens in somebody else's country.

Why can't Americans allow other people the same right of self determination that they themselves insist upon?

liberranter

Because, in what passes for the "mind" of the average Amoricon, no one else but Americans and no country other than America matters. Amerika ueber Alles, oder niemand ueber Alles.

USA USA USA

If only that were true!
"Look the Arab Spring, hurrah for all the patriots over-throwing their governments, democracy for the middle east and Africa. Let's support them by sending them weapons. Oh the poor Palestininans, oh the poor women of Aphganistan can't go to school, oh the poor people of Africa where kony is harassing them, help them help them help them! Get them weapons and jobs and give them money. Fight for them! Help Israel, help Mexico."

If only America would tell them all to pound sand, and all their stinking lobby groups too!
Please, go to China or somewhere, anywhere but here, and let them help you! Or how about close up your lobby group offices here and move back to the country you came from that you love so much and help the people there.

But who is a communist?Even Marx said that he had not been a marxist.For the dogmatic neoliberal who are in love with freedom,the freedom of the markets,stocks,deregulations things which make the unseen hand to bring the money in the pockets of the for ever 1% any "deviation" is the act of an enemy of freedom,of democracy,of America and Israel.So the deviator is put together with Hitler ,Stalin ,Ahmadinejad,Mao,Fidel.In contrast are the shiny figures of the civilized leaders:Bush,Blair,Bibi,Sharon the Mister Ga-Ga,Reagan and the late Lady Ga-Ga,Margaret Thatcher.And this simple upsetting of reality works .The funerals of Thatcher will be broadcasted in the whole world such everyone to be impressed by elegant,civilized ceremonial.

tinkersailor

You are the man sherban…… !!! Holding the Thacher passing up next to Chavez's…. The Iron lady vs the peoples man. There's a lot of grist there for the mills of the Gods to grind ……….." slowly (and) exceedingly fine"…….. that sherban has observed to be in their hopper for us to observe…

"Yesterday the devil came here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today." [at UN in 2006, on George W. Bush]

'Why would Chavez compare "W" to the devil…..mmmmmmmmmm??? It couldn't be the lies and forgeries the "W's" team Neoconz ponyed up, that was used to kill the million Iraqis? You don't think? Hey WTF.. In the end….it all turned out as planned and for the best: Halburton grossed 39 billion!! Sad about the million dead, and the hundreds of thousands of disabled vets that will make the taxpayers cost in the 5 to 7 trillion zone……So buck, up!!

Mike

Geez what morons….Deregulation do not bring about the problems were facing. Read a book not written by some statist maggot you idiot.

tinkersailor

That showboat of a woman did a lot more than "deregulate" She was a cheerleader for two wars.

And speaking of wars Mike, what was it that brought about "the problems we're facing"???

Your line "Deregulation do not bring about the problems were facing" should read "Deregulation did not bring about the problems we're facing" Hopefully, English is not your first language. If it is, your is sub literate grammar tells us more about you than your opinions…!!

hot hot hot

Well sinse you are holding up my posts….You poor thing, never been with a woman, I have two he has one :)

USA

Mike is right and you are wrong. Deregulation did not bring about the current problems plaguing the system today. Some will say well there was an explosion of whatever you want to c all it derivatives, yes this was true, there was. But at the same time there was also the explosion of 401K's There were videos of how peoples money were not just here but financing schemes overseas. Most people dumped their money in a 401k without any knowledge of what might happen to it. The poor and middle class finally have a say in their investmests? I watched a vid years ago where one woman was saying how her money was invested overseas, hopefully not Cyprus.
The IMF, The World Bank, and the UN are the bane of the world. As Americans, or Europeans, or those that decent, you cannot afford to take care of all these people in the way you think they should. Visit their country, appreciate their culture, buy a souvenir and leave. You should never want to change people, appreciate them for who they are. I have some lovely pictures and wonderful baskets and lovely rugs, I had once a lovely Satsuma tea set, where when you drank from the teacup you could see a lovely face in the bottom,
My grammar is horrible. English is not my first language.

Ben_C

In truth, the disdain for Hugo Chavez by many here in the US had absolutely nothing to do with his domestic politics….

In fact…he mentions Iran several times and claims that "the Iranian embassy in Caracas is the largest in the world"…whatever that means…

This makes me wonder: what exactly are the 'ideological ties' between Iran and Venezuela, and how do they translate into "the Iranian embassy in Caracas" being "the largest in the world"..according to Mr. Bolton? Was Chavez a secret 'Shi-ite Mullah Islamic terrorist' Bibi allegedly loses sleep over?

Mr. Bolton even mentions "Hezbollah" in passing when talking about 'Venezuela' and 'Hugo Chavez'…for whatever reason… Needless to say: this is confusing…

In the end, Mr. Bolton concludes: "this is the 'last time' to remove sanctions, or even weaken them"…as "the pressure is on"…after "the 'Assad Regime' in Syria is now 'under pressure' and Chavez dying in Venezuela"…

Mr. Bolton could have at least taken a cheap shot at the infamous ole' "Dictator Commie" if he thought any of that were important and/or relevant…the man's dead after all….and, on top of everything, he was speaking to a Fox News audience….it would have been 'Red Meat'…

tinkersailor

Anything mentally challenged Bolton says is sanity deficient. It's not syphilis it's Neoconmania. We know who that guy represents, and it's not the American People!

Strider55

I suspect the Iranian embassy snark was an attempt to imply that Chavez was an Iranian puppet. After all, the US embassy in Baghdad is in fact a symbol of Iraq's status as a US puppet.

John V. Walsh

“The Bolivarian Movement was born in the barracks some 15 years ago when a group of soldiers came to the conclusion that the enemy was not communism, but imperialism…..Bolívar, however, did foresee that North America was destined to plague us in the name of liberty." Wrote Chavez as quoted above in Justin's superb piece.
That is it in a nutshell. The history of the last hundred years – and more- is the history of the struggle against colonialism and imperialism. In the long run all else is a side issue..

JoaoAlfaiate

So people are celebrating Hugo's death. Gonna throw a block party when Dickie Boy snuffs it

richard vajs

Very good, Justin. Of course, Chavez was a Venezuelan patriot, a fact attacked by the fascists. You keep praising the correct people and condemning the skunks and you soon will find yourself outside the "conservative" world wherein you foolishly think you belong.

David4Peace

Thank you, Justin. I have to admit I didn't expect such honest treatment of a supposed Leftist from you. Need to give you more credit in the future. Notice how corporate media used Chavez' death as a major opportunity to discredit him and his movement. But the same media were livid when anyone tried to criticize Thatcher after her death.

john g

Sigh. Of course Hugo was a socialist. Maybe Justin, you just need to come to terms with the fact that socialism isn't so bad after all. Instead of denying that socialists are socialists when their policies are proven winners.
The US constitution entrenched elite power. The Bill of Rights gave it some legitimacy as in a social contract of sorts, but it's a far from democratic instrument. Socialism and democracy are far more compatible than your anarcho-capitalism or whatever the Austrians are calling themselves this week.

Mike

"socialism isn't so bad after all."

LOL! Tell that to the 100 million people who were slaughtered during the 20th century under socialism. It's like talking to a neo-Nazi insisting that Hitler wasn't so bad. Are you people mentally ill or just dumb as a box of rocks?

"whatever the Austrians are calling themselves this week. "

You've got to be kidding, right? Another "I don't know ****" answer. Get some help kid.

USA

Ha Ha, they should take a lesson too-"Hey I got a good idea, lets move to Galt's Gulch, in Chile." Ha ha ha ha! Didn't the Christians who came to this country try and escape to something better? Have their own religion? How long did that last? Didn't the Jews in Europe try to keep to themselves and have their businesses and such, how long did that last? Some people never learn, before you know it, you stole all the land from the indigenous people, nice to visit shouldn't move in. :)

john g

" Tell that to the 100 million people who were slaughtered during the 20th century under socialism."

Oh that tired old trope. Funny that the number continues to climb. We'll soon be at eleventy quadrillion at the current rate of hyperbolic expansion.

The wars of the 20th century were largely about capitalist imperialism.

And no, Stalin was no socialist.

tinkersailor

My many thanks to Mr Raimondo for his surprisingly generous piece on Hugo Chavez. This article is the true testimony to Mr Raimondo's complex mind. Not only is his wonderful narrative of Chavez's rise a story of manifest good intentions made real, he avoids the false categorizations of those who would prefer Venezuela under the IMF yoke as a vassal outpost. Here we see the art and illumination of Mr Raimondo's writing at it's brightest…

Dr.Khan

Good people are always taken away early..y???

May you rest in peace and give someone else the courage you had to carry on.

oh well Justin, you can come next to mine, poor thing. Always looking out for poor things. I have no God so I pretend I am God, want to be a Messiah, I want to change the world, just like you. I don't like the way other people live, too poor. I hate they way they dress. Why don't they look like us? I never love them when I see them, I don't like the way they dress, needs education, they are so stupid. Why don't they live like me. Gonna save them.

Chavez's salary was $12,000 usd per year. He left his"socialist" heirs more than $1,700,000,000 dollars is cash, investments, seized real estate and industrial assets in Venezuela, plus an undisclosed amount in Florida and Spain. Would anybody have an explanation of this? Also, does anyone have explanations of the massacres of indigenous persons, and imprisonment of police who upheld the constitution and legal due process, and judges imprisoned for refusing to convict people without evidence or a legal trial? , and hundreds of journalists? Tens of thousands of Cubans and Chinese, and Iranians just voted who are not citizens. If this is what you have in mind for the US, rest assured, we will send you to prison for treason.

Danny O'Leary

Bolivar had a beautiful vision of "La Gran Columbia," a largely Catholic place tolerant of different faiths, of education, good will, prosperity, liberty, freedom, democracy. He did not envision Cubazuela, which increasingly resembles the land of Idiiocracy, in the sheer incompetence of its' leaders, the rapacity and stupidity of its' indolent followers, the oppression of all who beg to loyally differ, the pursuit of a totally discredited ideology, the hypocrisy of corruption and self-service of self-enrichment with plundered private assets and public money so badly needed to help the poor become self-sustaining. The insane weapons race, supporting evil dictators that even George Bush wouldn't associate with, the selective attention to the rewritten constitution, the wholesale handing over of the nation's gold reserves to the parasitic Cuban Government, secret cash gifts, free oil, missiones on which billions were spent but never even half completed, the support of narco-trafficking and international terrorism….public insecurity, utilities that are down more than they function, suppression of a free press and free speech, the military participating in the civil political process, pandering to the most uneducated, unstable, and bigoted elements of the society rather than educating,while keeping them also desperate and hungry to use them as cannon fodder — this and all the rest, my relative Daniel O'Leary and his mentor Bolivar would loudly condemn as unfit for apeople who aspire and intend to be free!

O'Leary

Let me add this— those who are educated in the ways of this world and of cubazuela will attest to its' truth and accuracy. In the most Orwellian fashion possible, while screaming to high heaven and flailing his arms like a windmill whenever he wanted to play the demagogue and roust his cadre of true believers, Hugo Chavez also did a lot of secret business with the US, with Wall Street, with Frankfurt,, with the Swiss and etc.. He enriched himself andhis heirs, and his inner circle at the expense of those he promised to justly and fairly govern, and of the poor whom he promised to champion but largely disappointed. He also cozened the domestic Oligarchy, making his family and his inner circle as rich as them. Want to see the truth of it? Just do some real estate and business entity research in South Florida, check out Weston, check who is buying glitzy toys, visiting Disneyland here or in France, who is opening accounts with private bankers here or in tax havens. The hacked tax haven should be up in Wikileaks soon…you'll see Mr and Mrs Arreaga-Chavez, the Maduro-Flores, Cabello, Jaua, Tascon, the Castros, Fernandez, Valera, and all the rest. So, how do you feel about the four tweener boys who were lifted a month ago and nobody has hear from them since?

Oleary

Tyrants in this world come in many shapes and sizes. Soem wear stripes, some paisley, some olive drab or straw hats with fake birds on the top. They publicly preach a full gamut of ideologies from right to left to purely whacko. Tyrants expend much more resources to do a fraction of thenecessary job that good people everywhere merit from leaders and waste many lives, often destroy the futures of teeming billions for purely narcissistic motives. Chavez, Maduro, Noriega, Saddam, Khadaffi, Assad, Khomeni, Castro, Bush, Bolton, Putin, Rove, Reagan, Thatcher, etc. all probably think they are very different because they focus on wishes, visual symbolism of ceremony, fashions, uniforms and the like, and words. They are dazzled by the Spectacle, as are all followers. But let's lift our own blinders, look at the actions and results, the means and methods, and there is a banal homogeneity about them all, a mediocrity and sameness that truly is chilling. When we finally beat this racket that Orwell nailed down so well, the beast that bosses them all will shriek and tear at itself. We merit better people, let's git it together!

Oleary

Oh, yeah, the hacked tax haven data also includes Eva Golinger Moncada, she found ways to stash the $.5 million USD she most recently got from Chavez, and a bit of the previous funny money she was paid by the VIO. Word on the street is that Eva has been very indiscreet of late, and it is going to boomerang on her en tout de suite. The rope is now just about at full extension…Eva helped put forty some odd journalists in Venezuela into a McCarthyesque kangaroo court back in 2007, what goes around comes around. For the heartless and unjust,there is no impunity, only the illusion of it.

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].